Work history:
I attended Rice University in Houston,
Texas. I began working part-time as a student microcomputer consultant
in 1987 for the central campus computing organization. A year later I
switched to a student UNIX systems administration position as UNIX began
to explode on campus. In 1989 I joined the University staff as a UNIX
Systems Programmer. I completed my degree and graduated in May, 1991.
I worked happily at Rice as the leader of a group of full and part-time
UNIX administors until I moved up to Baltimore in October, 1993 to
become engaged.

I worked as a contractor for Pencom to
Bell Atlantic-MD in Silver Spring
for about a year before extending my 70 mile/day commute to a 110 mile/day
one by taking a job at a small software development company, Personal Library
Software. This insanity ended in 1996 and I now have a scenic 7 mile/day
commute which avoids both the Baltimore and the DC beltways! I often bike to
work during nice weather.

Distributed Computing:
The typical computer wastes MOST of its mathematical potential. While you
sleep. While you think about what to type next. Given the millions of
networked computers in the world, and all of their potential computational
power, it seems obvious that it could be put to good use. And it can.
While many thousands of people donate their spare computer power to the
search for extra terrestial life, (SETI), it seems like a (much) better
idea to devote that power to healthcare - the health of humans and of the
Earth's biosphere.

Therefore I have been very interested in participating in distributed
computing efforts related to protein folding, and now climate modeling.
For a single page that describes (and illustrates!) protein folding very
well, see
this page
from
Stanford University's Folding@Home
project. Folding@Home has been a huge success. Please visit their site and consider installing their screen saver on your computer!!!

Sadly, Folding@Home does not offer a Solaris client program, so I have contributed some computation to another protein folding research effort, the Distributed Folding Project
. It is one of the activities of the Blueprint Initiative, a research
program of the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in
Toronto, Canada.

Personal:
Is global warming just a theory? I think not.
Even if it is not 100% human-caused, do we want to risk being wrong? Shouldn't
we take better care of the planet...anyway?!?!? There ARE other planets out
there, but they won't help us. It's like drowning at the bottom of a backyard
swimming pool looking upwards at the sunlight. There IS air up there, but if
you can't reach it in time, it doesn't matter.

Therefore I have started eliminating electrical waste at home and work.
Using electricity is good. Wasting it is not. Baltimore's electricity is
primarily made from coal and nuclear sources. Both of those are expensive,
in the long term. Coal is dirty now, nuclear is dirty long into the future.

After replacing most of the lightbulbs in my house with compact fluorescents,
I decided to actually generate some
electricity. I am now using a solar panel to create electricity! It wasn't
hard!
Check out my home solar electric system!!!

I'm a lifetime member of
Real Goods, a company which sells
products to help us have an ecologically-sustainable future. Go there. Learn
new ideas. Reduce, reuse, recycle. (Lifetime membership cost me $50, got me
the $30 book I wanted to buy anyway (the
Solar Living Sourcebook),
and
I save 5% on everything I order from them.)

During my long-distance commuting life, I was saved from mental breakdown
by the intelligent and diverse programming on
WAMU 88.5FM
and WJHU 88.1FM, which carry programs by NPR.
I had three hours a day in the car to listen and now I'm a firm supporter
of the Public Broadcasting Corporation. The magic of the marketplace DOES
NOT produce excellent broadcast journalism -- it produces Hard Copy and
other trash (Question: What's Michael Jackson doing these days? Answer: I
still don't care.).